Night Control (or Christopher Curtis Smith, the name he likely uses when making airline reservations) has just released a second LP, Life Control, on Kill Shaman. Considering that Smith’s well-received 2009 full length, Death Control, trimmed down a decade’s worth of self-recorded sound experiments into a 19-track “greatest hits” album, the year that Smith spent on Life Control speaks of conversion to a comparatively brutal efficiency.
In case you were waiting with baited breath: Life Control defies any assumption that newfound acclaim and revised recording methods have led Smith towards anything approaching a rapprochement with the Other Music “in” section.
For those of you unfamiliar with The Night Control Sound,™ it isn’t unlike early Ariel Pink, with flashes of Women. There’s occasional dreamy pop, lots of heroin-addict nodding and drifting, and a sea of muddy, homemade production values. Life Control frustrates in the same way that Women (the band) frustrates, giving you a taste for perfect melody and then drifting into experimental clatter. There’s a little less “drifting” here than on last year’s LP, and there’s always the possibility that, like Ariel Pink, a hi-fi future is in Night Control’s future. But considering that the 21st century Rumpelstiltskin released about 5 full-lengths and received major Paw Tracks endorsement before he made the jump to 4AD, I wouldn’t expect a sugary-pop Night Control anytime in the near future.
In any event, I have 3 songs from Life Control streaming below. They are, by necessity, the poppiest and the punchiest: longer, more experimental tracks clock in at 6 minutes or longer and comprise untold megabytes of file size. If you’d like to hear more, just get in touch.
- CSCS
- Take ApartTake Apart
- The WordThe Word
